Quotes About Mathematics

Ben invented mathematical theories that even he didn't manage to remember and wrote such bizarre tales of adventure that he ended up destroying them a week after they were finished, embarrassed at the thought that he had penned them.

There was someone called Hippasus in Greek times who found out about the diagonal of a square and they drowned him because no one wanted to know about things like that. Like what? Numbers that make you uncomfortable and don't relate to oranges.

Algebra is the metaphysics of arithmetic.

A sane mind should not be guilty of a logical fallacy, yet there are very fine minds incapable of following mathematical demonstrations.

All things began in order, so shall they end, and so shall they begin again; according to the ordainer of order and mystical Mathematicks of the City of Heaven.

What we mean when speaking of myth in general is story, the ability of story to explain ourselves to ourselves in ways that physics, philosophy, mathematics, chemistry—all very highly useful and informative in their own right—can't.

I tell them that if they will occupy themselves with the study of mathematics they will find in it the best remedy against the lusts of the flesh.

All variables are independent.

If one chooses to call tests that require the mastery of abstractions culturally biased, because some cultures put more emphasis on abstractions than others, that raises fundamental questions about what the tests are for. In a world where the ability to master abstractions is fundamental to mathematics, science and other endeavors, the measurement of that ability is not an arbitrary bias. A culture-free test might be appropriate in a culture-free society—but there are no such societies.

Students mismatched with institutions whose standards they did not meet would either fail to graduate as often as others or would manage to graduate only by avoiding difficult subjects like science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

I know that the way he comes into a classroom, he wants the students to leave knowing math. This makes me open my mind to what he has to say and how he's trying to say it.

The idea that there's someone for everyone is mathematically impossible. I found my Mr Right and he ended up being a Right Bastard. As did yours.

he presented me with a mathematical conundrum," he said. "It's a famous one, the P = NP problem. Basically, it asks whether it's more difficult to think of the solution to a problem yourself or to ascertain if someone else's answer to the same problem is correct.

You're familiar with the P = NP problem, right?" Yukawa asked from behind him. Ishigami looked around. "You're referring to the question of whether or not it is as easy to determine the accuracy of another person's results as it is to solve the problem yourself—or, failing that, how the difference in difficulty compares. It's one of the questions the Clay Mathematics Institute has offered a prize to solve.

He had always thought of mathematics as a treasure hunt. First, one had to decide where to dig; then one had to determine the proper excavation route that led to the answer. Once you had a plan, you could make formulas to fit it, and they would give you clues. If you wound up empty-handed, you had to go back to the beginning and choose another route. Only by doing this over and over, patiently, yet boldly, could you hope to find the treasure—a solution no one else had ever found.

The sine of an angle is the ratio of the lengths of the side of the triangle opposite the angle and the hypotenuse.

Steele found, for example, that if he could convince women who took difficult mathematics examinations that everyone connected with the test assumed they would perform as well as men, that they did.

Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects: at the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts.

There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why?

tienes que hacer?». La chica contestaba: «Tengo que buscar el mínimo común denominador». El padre preguntaba: «¿Todavía lo están buscando? Ya estaban haciéndolo cuando yo iba al colegio». Sé cómo se sentía. Sin

Mathematics brought rigor to economics. Unfortunately it also brought mortis.

Blaise Pascal used to mark with charcoal the walls of his playroom, seeking a means of making a circle perfectly round and a triangle whose sides and angle were all equal. He discovered these things for himself and then began to seek the relationship which existed between them. He did not know any mathematical terms and so he made up his own. Using these names he made axioms and finally developed perfect demonstrations, until he had come to the thirty-second proposition of Euclid.

I think actually if you take the analogy with other areas of engineering, and increasingly of science and even mathematics, you can see people do not have to learn the vast number of formulae they used to learn. Instead, they have to learn to use the computer effectively. This frees them, I feel, to understand concepts and the foundations while they're learning the mechanics of the application of the theory.

Even the most carefully defined philosophical or mathematical concept, which we are sure does not contain more than we have put into it, is nevertheless more than we assume. It is a psychic event and as such partly unknowable. The very numbers you use in counting are more than you take them to be. They are at the same time mythological elements (for the Pythagoreans, they were even divine); but you are certainly unaware of this when you use numbers for a practical purpose.